Stretching out on a summer’s day: an interview with Inspiral Carpets’ Clint Boon, Guilfest, 2026

Saturn five out of five: Clint Boon’s Inspiral Carpets were the standout act at Guilfest 2026. Pic: Jayne Houghton

Britain is in the midst of a heatwave – the third of 2026. The last time it was this consistently hot, dinosaurs roamed the planet. Incredibly, Guildford is even more sweltering than London but looking for positives, at least it isn’t raining for the Guilfest weekend. In fact, Stoke Park is at its 10,000 capacity – the busiest it’s been since the rebirth of the Surrey jamboree in 2024.

Inspiral Carpets are playing on the Second Stage later this evening and would give the performance of the festival. Before that, Farfisa organ authority and Madchester ambassador Clint Boon is with us in the Literary Tent, dressed in short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans and black Adidas trainers. He’s a ball of energy even though he’s just turned 67 and has the unmistakeable aura of a superstar.

As Clint had explained on the phone earlier in the week, he likes to talk! And there’s much to discuss – an autobiography out in September, brilliant new single “Drag The Bag” has just been released and there’s an Inspiral Carpets album scheduled for early 2027. Our tent is full – full of people from Oldham – and despite the outside temperature doggedly sticking to 30°C, it isn’t too bad inside this canvas cocoon. In fact, as it says on the T-shirts that Inspirals fans are wearing around the site, it’s cool as f***.

Lee Gale: It’s a bit cooler in here than it is outside.
Clint Boon: It is now that I’m here. Brrrmmm-tssshhh!

Clint, have you played these Surrey parts before?
I thought we’d done Guilfest before, but I think I got mixed up with the Canterbury Festival that we did many years ago. So we haven’t done Guilfest but over the years we’ve done a lot in this part of the world. There used to be a big mod scene down here, didn’t there? Back in’t day. It’s beautiful round here, innit!

You’re doing a fair amount of gigs this year. Where have you been to and where are you going?
Well, we just started off last weekend. We were in Stoke, Shrewsbury and somewhere else beginning with S. We just did Kidderminster. I can’t remember where we were last night… Oscar? [Clint’s son, Oscar, who plays guitar with the Inspiral Carpets, is in the front row.] Oxford. Yes. We’re doing little gigs like this, warm-up gigs as they call them, smaller club gigs. We did a few gigs recently for the Everywhere At Once Festival to support grassroots venues.

Do you still enjoy it?
I love it more than ever. It’s spooky. It scares me sometimes. I wake up when it’s the day to get on the bus and go on tour and I’m buzzing. Absolutely, still – and I think I shouldn’t be like that. There’s something unhealthy about it! If I can explain, I’ve been doing this for 40 years with this band and I appreciate the fact that we’ve still got an audience that want to come to the gigs, buy the records, talk to us, take our pictures, whatever. It’s like a child, isn’t it? You’ve nurtured it for all your life – so why switch it off? Why not just keep doing it if people want it? So yes, I love it more than ever.

How do you deal with heat when doing gigs on days like this? Do you have a tropical outfit to wear?
Not really. This is about as tropical as I get. I don’t generally sweat a lot, to be honest. We’ve got a bus that’s got air conditioning, so we’ve all been sheltering in that, looking smugly out of the window at you lot! You’ll very rarely see me in shorts. I’m not a shorts kind of man and I’ve got the whitest legs. I’m quite a hairy bloke generally. But for some reason, from here down [points to knees], there’s no hairs. I don’t know if that’s a syndrome or summat.

How do you choose what to wear for a gig? Do you try some outfits out?
We’ve always thought we’re a bit psychedelic. When we’re getting ready in the dressing room we’ll have that moment where we’ll ask each other, “What colour shirt are you wearing?” A lot of the time though, we still end up walking on stage looking like we’re in five different bands! Generally, it’s this sort of look, innit? Trampoline have been supporting us and Jack [Jones], the singer, said to me at the end of one night, “Do you know who you remind me of with your shirt and your style? Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys.” I think that’s a great template for the band, if we’re going to look like that and make people feel like that. It’s one of Oscar’s favourite bands as well!

Have you got a tour bus when going around the country, and are there any rules on the bus?
No shitting in it. That is serious. So, these rock tour buses, they have everything. You’ve got a kitchen, two lounges usually, various tellies, video games, fridges and all that. The bar, obviously. And a toilet. But the one rule is, you can’t do number twos in the toilet. It’s the first rule in rock’n’roll touring. You can get the drama sometimes when you wake up in the morning and you need to go! Usually, at home you’ll go to the toilet when you get up, but you can’t do that on the bus. So… what was the question? Yeah, anything else is fine.

You’ve got a new album out in 2027 – in January, isn’t it?
Yes, the album’s recorded. It’s finished, due out in January. We’re putting singles out between now and January. “Drag The Bag” has been out for a few weeks. We’ve got a new single out next week [“There’s A Better Way”]. We’re doing that today in our set. The album’s phenomenal. I think it’s our most perfect album to date.

If it’s finished, why don’t you release it now?
God knows. It’s the way that some bands do it these days. We’ve got a new manager recently. Alan McGee is now our manager and he’s brilliant. We can already feel the benefit of what he’s bringing to the table. But one of the things he suggested was actually putting the album out in January and to get a bunch of singles out through the year. It’s called Burn Like The Sun, the album.

Your son Oscar’s in the band.
Yes, that’s him there. Oscar, he started off playing bass first of all. When we reformed in 2023 after a six-year break, Martyn [Walsh], our bass player, he didn’t fancy doing it. He wasn’t ready for it. His dad was very poorly and he was still grieving for Craig [Gill], our drummer who died in 2016, so when we got back together, Martyn just said, “I’m not ready for it. You guys carry on without me.” So we got Oscar in on bass and he smashed it – not literally! But he smashed it. And then recently, Martyn’s come back. But then Graham [Lambert], our guitarist, said, “I want to have a break.” It’s like it’s a school when you want to go out and have a wee! Graham’s having a break now and Oscar’s on guitar.

So certain personnel will have a break for a bit and you replace them?
That’s not part of our manifesto as such but that’s how it’s working out. It’s how it’s happening, and it seems to be what some bands do. You know, it seems more acceptable these days, but we’ve always had a fluid sort of vibe about the band anyway. We’ve lost our singer twice. We’ve just carried on. We’re quite unusual in that respect. I think it’s fine. When you get to my age – we’re well into our 60s some of us – you know, there’ll probably come a time where maybe I don’t want to do it for a couple of months. At the moment, I can’t see that. I’m totally, totally into it.

How old is Oscar?
Twenty-two.

So he’s a proper Inspiral Carpet, then.
A proper Inspiral Carpet, yes. He’ll probably be taking over from me, won’t he, when I pop off!

A lot of us remember what we call the classic line-up of Inspiral Carpets, which is about 1991. Tom Hingley was your singer. He had a wonderful voice. And now the singer is Stephen Holt. But he was the original singer.
So the backstory is, Stephen and Graham started the band in 1983. I joined in ’86. I had a little studio just outside Manchester and they came to me so I could record some demos for them as a producer, which I did, and I fell in love with the music as soon as I heard it. I pretty much blagged my way into the band because they didn’t have keyboards. They were just a punk garage band and I thought if I can get this Farfisa organ into this unit it’ll sound like these great Sixties bands. I was a massive fan of bands like The Seeds and The 13th Floor Elevators. I persuaded Graham one night to let me have a go jamming with them and that was it. I was in. Things started happening pretty quickly. You know, John Peel became a big fan of the band.

I was going to ask about John Peel.
John was absolutely into us. We did a Peel Session with Stephen and then towards the end of ’88, Stephen decided he was pulling out of the band.

Why was that?
Well, at the time, none of us knew how big we were going to get. I think Ste was about to get married and needed the steady income, and we didn’t have any steady income. So he opted out. It was quite amicable and we soon found Tom. He was in a band from up north that we knew, Too Much Texas, so we installed Tom and went on to make some great records, which will always be great records. And then Ste came back in when Tom and us split in 2011. We just started seeing it as him re-joining a band that he started in ’83. The last gig he did in ’88 was a little place in London called The Cricketers to a very small crowd.

The pub at Oval. Demolished a few years ago.
We played to about 40 people. The support band was Jesus Jones, who’d not even made a record at the time. And that was his last gig. We literally drove back up north, dropped him off and we didn’t see him then for the next 23 years or something. And I remember him coming back into the band. His first gig back with us was in Argentina, Buenos Aires, to 8,000 people. It was like a little fairy tale! He spent years, and he’s admitted it, spent years watching us get bigger and bigger, and trying to come to terms with his decision to leave. Y’know, watching us on Top Of The Pops, and all that. But getting him back in the band, he’s loving it.

Stephen and Tom – two completely different singing styles.
Two completely different styles. When you see him today, Steve, there’s something quite magical about his voice and his presence as well. I know Tom still does his thing and he’s got it. He’s a great frontman but I think Ste suits where we’re at with the band now. He looks great for whatever he is, 62 or something. He looks brilliant, I think.

As this is the Literary Tent, could you tell us about your new book?
So yes, my first book [The Manchester Chronicles: True Tales Of Music, Madness And Mayhem 1976-2006]. I’ve not done a book before, but over my career a lot of people said, “You should write a book.” I’ve always been too busy to write one. I got approached about five years ago by a publishing company from London. A guy called Jake Lingwood [at publisher Monoray] asked me to do a book. He asked me to write one and I said, “Well, I’m a bit busy at the moment, but I’ll think about it.” I had a job in radio, which I sacked off two-and-a-half, three years ago. And it was when I got out of the radio that I thought, “I’ve got time to do a book now.” I got back to Jake, and I started writing it. It’s been quite intense. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like that before. I can write words and make decent sentences but putting an actual book together was something that I’d never done.

You found it intense?
It’s one of the most intense things I’ve ever done. And then once you start getting deadlines, you know, “We need to deliver it!” There’s all these other things going on in my life – Inspirals putting an album together and I’m DJing every weekend. Sometimes five, six gigs in a weekend. I’m working on a movie, a musical that’s been going on for many years. I’ve got all this stuff going on. Then you’ve got the family life. You know, I’ve got kids. There’s always a poorly kid or a poorly dog or something! I went through all that, and even in January and February of this year, I was still going through that. Then it was finished and I suddenly felt like I’d been born again. And then you think, “Right, I need to get all this DIY done that I’ve been putting off for the last few years. The house is falling apart!”

When is the book out?
September. Very soon. It’s not a total autobiography as such. It starts in 1976 when I saw the Sex Pistols in Manchester and it goes on for around a 30-year period including the Inspirals reforming in 2003, after we’d split in 1995, and years of me saying I never wanted to do that again because I’d moved on. And then suddenly, for one reason or another, one day I thought, “I want to do it again!” So it sort of covers that period in my life. It’s the story of my journey in music through that period, but it’s also my observations of the Manchester music scene and of Manchester as a city, the way it changed into what it is now. Because when the story starts in the mid-Seventies, at that time, the city was suffering and now it’s like Utopia. It’s beautiful!

It was the likes of you, Factory Records bands and The Stone Roses that really lifted Manchester, and you made it what it is today. Would that be safe to say?
Yes, we contributed, definitely. We were inspired by Tony Wilson and the Buzzcocks, you know, because the Buzzcocks were, I think, the first British punk band to put out their own single. Rather than finding a record label in London to put it out, they just set up a little label for this amazing record. So they did that. Then there was Tony Wilson, who was quite established as a TV journalist at the time. We all respected him and loved him. He had this authority about him because he was on the telly. He had long hair, and it was like, he was guiding us through it. He was very charismatic. So when he started turning up at gigs, it just gave the city a different sort of credibility. It became cool to strive to stay in Manchester and to keep our roots there as businesses.

Why did you not sign to Factory?
We actually got offered it. We, in our wisdom, decided against it because Factory was such a shambolic business. Part of its beauty was it was falling apart, wasn’t it? Nobody was making money. We saw that and we were very industrious. We come from, like, we’d had real jobs, you know. I was in the furniture trade. Graham had been a printer and Martyn had worked in record shops. Craig, our drummer, joined the band when he was 14, so he never had a job. He was 14 years old, and then he was a pop star! F***in’ incredible! The Factory thing – we were quite business-minded. We realised that we needed some longevity, needed some steady income eventually. When we saw what was happening at Factory, we thought it probably wouldn’t work for us – and it wouldn’t have done. We ended up with Mute Records, which was a great label. That was the best decision we ever made. Absolutely.

I got into the Inspirals because of the whole Madchester thing. What do you remember of those times in 1989 and ’90? Did you used to go to the Haçienda?
I started going to the Haçienda the week it opened.

Which was 1982.
Nineteen eighty-two, yes. It was just empty. Nobody was going there.

It was like that for a couple of years, wasn’t it?
At least a couple of years. I ended up going there when they started having bands on. There’s a bit in the 24 Hour Party People movie where Steve Coogan’s playing the part of Tony Wilson, and on stage, there’s Vini Reilly from Durutti Column. Vini finishes a song and then Tony is there in his trenchcoat, clapping on the dancefloor. He’s the only person in the room, and I remember that happening, like twice a week for two years. It was nice to see the whole Madchester scene unfold as it did, because when we first started breaking through in Manchester, it felt a bit like we were isolated. You know, we didn’t feel like part of the scene at the beginning. The Mondays were doing what they were doing in a different part of the city. We didn’t really know that at that time.

Did you get on with the Mondays?
Always got on from day one. Apart from the time when someone told me Shaun wanted to stab me! That’s in the book. He doesn’t remember it, by the way! We’ve always got on with all of them. The beauty of it was, we didn’t try to sound like each other. We were in Oldham, and that’s eight miles outside Manchester, and we were doing psychedelic garage punk. We weren’t striving to be great musicians. We were just making this exciting music. And in a different part of town were the Mondays who were doing a sort of hybrid of punk and funk. Then you had the Roses, again embracing the Sixties stuff – and the Paisley Underground as it was called in the Eighties, which was this American wave of psychedelic bands like REM, The Long Ryders and Green On Red. So you just had these three bands working completely independently and away from each other, and that became the bands that got thrown together later as Madchester. I don’t think there’s been a scene where the three main bands have been so different. When it comes to Merseybeat, you know, or punk and Two Tone, a lot of the bands sound very similar. Our scene started with three bands that sounded completely different than each other.

And you had A Guy Called Gerald and 808 State, Paris Angels, The Charlatans, New Order.
It was incredible, the whole thing. I think a lot of it was the place – Manchester is a great city. Geographically, we’re in a great place. Climate-wise – Tony used to say that the reason Manchester was so prolific as a music city was because it rained all the time. We all sat in listening to our mum’s and dad’s records from 1959 up to 1975 or something, which is true, I think, to some extent. Is anybody here from Manchester? The people are just really welcoming and always supportive of each other. I felt that when we started our band, it was a great scene in Oldham in the Eighties, and they were all helping each other, working with each other, and that was how Madchester was. You know, always supportive, never really bitching about each other. I remember when we first heard “Fools Gold” on the radio. It was on Radio 1 with Simon Bates, of all people! We were driving to London to do a gig in a minibus, and it came on the radio, and we were like, “F***ing hell.” We’d never heard anything like it. And it’s our mates! Like, everything’s just changed. So, we weren’t there, thinking they’re better than us or anything. We’re just thinking like, “It’s changing – we need to up our game a bit here.” I think that’s how the general vibe was, always, you know, feeding off each other.

There’d be an amazing track out every week. It was like a tidal wave.
I still love it. I mentioned earlier, I DJ a lot and I love playing Madchester records. I get a lot of memories from playing them and it’s still a great community as well. Most of the main players are still in the city. I bumped into Dermo two weeks ago. At an event one afternoon.

Northside are gigging at the moment.
He’s had a bit of a health issue but he’s fine. It’s like all these people up north, we’ve lost a few, haven’t we? I’ve lost a few close friends and icons of the music scene up there in recent years. But it’s still a healthy, supportive scene. I love that and I’m proud I’ve come from it.

I don’t know how many people will know, but Noel Gallagher used to be on your payroll.
That’s right, yes.

He was a roadie. I saw you at Glastonbury in ’94. I took a picture of you, and you’ve got Noel Gallagher next to you, with sunglasses on and the mop-top hair, and they were just breaking through as Oasis. But he was a roadie for Inspiral Carpets before that.
He came to us when Stephen left. Backtrack into that story, Stephen left at the end of ’88, and Noel at this point was a fan. We knew he was a fan of the band. He’d been coming to gigs for quite a while watching us and when he heard that Stephen had left, he was the first person to say, “I want to audition to be your singer.” We all thought that was weird because it’s like this little kid from Burnage with one eyebrow and a little bit of a throat box. He’s got a real big Adam’s apple. In fact, we used to call him “Clacker”. One of the nicknames was Clacker. Is that actually a word, clacker? Anyway, we had all these auditions for our singer and even though we loved him as a bloke, we said, “Your voice doesn’t suit what we’re doing.” So we took him on as a roadie from that point, and then he was with us for four years, I think.

Was he hardworking?
No, he was a lazy bastard. He was very loyal to what we did. He was a big fan of what we did. There’s a lot about Noel in the book about how, you know, we’d pack him off to the record shops in Manchester with two binbags full of T-shirts over his shoulders, and he’d go deliver a dozen Cool As F*** T-shirts at Piccadilly Records and HMV. He was very loyal and he came around the world with us, and he learnt a lot about the industry, which he still gives us a lot of credit for. We’d never seen him sweating! He’d always get the local crew to do everything. We’d pull up at a gig or whatever, and he’d be bossing them all around, saying, “You go and do that, you go and do that.” I mean, it was like, he was good, Lee – he got the job done.

I’m a big fan of Manchester band The Fall. You worked with Mark E Smith on one of your great records, “I Want You”. When was that? In ’94?
Yeah, ’94 it would have been. Well, I first met Mark years and years before that when I started watching the punk bands. The Fall were one of the first bands that I totally became obsessed with and I ended up becoming close friends with a woman called Karen. She was very friendly with The Fall. She used to drive them about in her car and she started letting me tag along. So I’d be in the dressing room with The Fall, at all these gigs in 1978, ’79, hanging out with Mark E Smith. He was one of my music heroes. He still is. So I’d met him back then and as the Inspirals started to become successful Mark had set up office in the same building us as, 23 New Mount Street in Manchester. He always let on and he was always really complimentary about our band. He went out of his way to say, “You’re better than the other Manchester bands because you’re like The Seeds, you’re like The Chocolate Watchband.” He used to love that psychedelic Sixties stuff, so he had a big soft spot for us. Bands used to put remixes out at that time…

For a better chart position, wasn’t it? I’ve got loads of them.
You’d release a single and then you’d do a remix of it, and it meant that you’d get more copies sold to get the record in the charts. That remix culture was massive in the early Nineties. We got to a point where we were like, “This is getting a bit boring now.” Because some of these remixes were shit, and you’d be paying some DJ £2,000 to speed your record up a bit with a “Ah yeah!!” sample on it. We decided to change things for the singles we were going to release off the album. We said, “Let’s do some collaborations with people so we can put those out as the alternative versions.” We decided on Mark E Smith, Peter Hook, Basil Clarke out of a band called Yargo, and I made the call to Mark. He was out on tour somewhere. I managed to get his hotel number off his management and then I put the idea to him. “Will you collaborate on a couple of tracks off the album so we can put them out as alternative versions?” And he just said, “Send me the tape Clint, and I’ll see what I can do. Alright, cock!” Sent him the album, and he came back. He said, “I’ll do that ‘I Want You’ one, I’ll do that. And that ‘Sputnik’ one.” And I said, “‘Sputnik’?”, He said, “Yeah, ‘Sputnik 5’.” So he did alternative vocals on those two tracks [“I Want You” and “Saturn 5”), and we decided that “I Want You” should be a single.

You were on Top Of The Pops with it.
We were on Top Of The Pops, which was f***in’ bizarre. Mark E Smith and Elvis Presley were my two all-time music heroes, and there I was on Top Of The Pops with Mark E Smith. Just absolutely a highlight of my life. The funny thing is on the way to that Top Of The Pops filming that night… I think they filmed it on a Wednesday, went out the following night. So when we were in the green room waiting to go down to do the filming, Mark had been winding up the TV crew, not deliberately, but by being spontaneous and erratic, shambolic. Every time they filmed a run-through, he was in a different part of the stage. We’re doing the rehearsals in the afternoon – he’d be singing different words, or he’d be messing about with people’s instruments or amplifiers. It got to a point where our plugger pulled me and Graham to one side and said, “They want to get Mark off the show.” Seriously, this happened. I said, “If Mark goes home, we’re going home. We’re not doing it.” We were willing to sacrifice that TV appearance, which would have gone out to seven, eight, nine million people, whatever, and we said, “He’s going to do it. If he doesn’t do it, we’re not doing it.” Anyway, we did it in the end. And, obviously, it was different to any performance he’d done in the afternoon!

Leather jacket on, at the front of the stage.
Yeah and reading the words on a piece of paper.

Could you tell us about your organ? It’s after six o’clock.
My organ… The organ I use is a 1966 Farfisa Compact Duo, which is an Italian machine, and I bought it after being inspired by punk. I think before punk, I was planning on going to do art at university. I was going to be an art teacher or whatever. I can’t remember now what I was dreaming about! But punk changed everything. I dropped out of art college and started buying equipment that could make sounds. I found this organ in the back of the music press. It was for sale in the small ads.

How much was it?
Hundred quid. From a guy – I found his address the other week, actually. It’s in the book. From down here somewhere. Woking or somewhere like that. But this Farfisa was like a really unique sound. At the time in the Eighties, most bands that wanted an organ sound went for the Hammond, which is like a wooa-wooa-wooa sound. Whereas mine’s like an eeeeeeeh!!, like a duck. It sounds like a duck if you just play it without any effects on it. It sounds like “Telstar” by Joe Meek, so I love it. It’s my favourite thing. Over the years, I’ve stopped touring with it because it’s a vintage piece of gear. So I’m now using these Nord keyboards that have got a beautiful emulator of the Farfisa. It’s still very much the Farfisa sound.

What can we expect from the band tonight?
We’ve been doing one-hour-and-45-minute sets with five new songs in there. But tonight we’re doing 50 minutes with two new songs.

Brilliant. Is there a favourite track of yours that you like to play live?
Somebody asked me this other day. Every single song in the set. I was talking to a booker recently, and he asked the same question.

All of them.
Yeah, for different reasons. Like some of them don’t get the same crowd reaction as others. But to me, I remember the story about “Sackville”, for example. When I do “Sackville”, I can see the street that inspired it and I can see where I was sitting, what I was seeing. “This Is How It Feels” – and you see the effect that has on the crowd. So that’s special for a different reason, isn’t it? That’s beautiful for a different reason. I think “Saturn 5” is a bit of a masterpiece too.

I’ve just been told we’ve got five minutes left so have you got time to answer questions from the audience?
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Audience Member 1 (Oscar Boon): So I’ve got a bit of a silly one, completely unrelated to music. When I see you speaking, I notice you’ve got a slight idiosyncrasy.
A what?

Audience Member 1 (Oscar Boon): An idiosyncrasy. You’re a very ‘wide-legged’ speaker when you’re standing or sitting. And I was wondering, has that ever backfired in any way?
I don’t know why I do that. I think it’s harder to fall over when you’re like that. It keeps it cool down here too, doesn’t it! I’ve no idea where that came from. Well, I do see my reflection sometimes when I’m doing it, thinking, “That doesn’t look right, that. Need to narrow it down a bit.” I just say I’m built this way. Just a wide-legged kind of thing. There’s a name for it, isn’t there? Manspreading?

Audience Member 2: Hi, I’m from Royton near Oldham.
Whereabouts in Royton?

Audience Member 2: Thornham. Near the Summit. When the Summit was cool! I just wanted to know what was your favourite gig to play in Oldham. It won’t mean anything to anyone else, but what was your favourite gig to play? I was a little bit young to come and see you, but I’ve always followed you.
Right, there’s some good pubs, you know. The Bridgewater on Manchester Road, which is now Tim Hortons burger bar on the same spot. Well, some of those early pub gigs were really big. We played Royton Band Club once. We played, The Jerks played and there were a couple of other local bands. That was phenomenal. The Grey Horse was always a great venue to play. Beyond Oldham, doing GMEX in ’90 was a big moment. That was the first time my mum and dad saw me play live. So we’ve done years of playing these pubs and little bars and that, and then suddenly we played this 11,000-capacity venue, the biggest place in Manchester at the time, and I remember coming on stage and seeing all these people. I met up with my mum and dad before the gig at the bar. I remember coming on stage and looking up at the VIP section, I could see my Mum and Dad clearly. GMEX ’90 was a special moment, and then a couple of weeks after that, we did the Reading Festival, which we headlined on Saturday night, and that was when the Reading Festival was the biggest festival in the UK, bigger than Glastonbury at the time, and whoever headlined it on Saturday night was pretty much the best band in the world. New Order did it the year before us. And so to be doing that – and you’re sat there thinking, “A little while ago we didn’t even have a record deal – we were still putting self-released indie records out!”

Audience Member 2: You guys, you changed the way that everybody dressed and felt and everything at the time.
Thanks for saying that. That’s good to know. Thanks. Buy the book!!

Thank you very much – Clint Boon!
Thank you. Thank you very much, guys. Enjoy the gig.